It may just be that, by the grace of God, we will yet see revival in our nation once again. It is also important for us to remember that, generally speaking, it is not the preachers whom God uses to kick-start times of revival but it is the pray-ers whom God first uses.

Back still in the relatively early days of when the Covid Pandemic hit our nation, the church I attend, like many churches, had a time of prayer and fasting. We prayed for the healing of our nation from the pandemic, of course, but we also prayed that God would use this pandemic as a means of turning the minds and hearts of a now largely godless nation towards Him. We prayed that people would see this pandemic as a divinely inspired punishment and warning, hearing the voice of God within it, crying out, “Repent of your sins, and seek for the Lord while He may be found!”
My church, like the majority of churches, came out of the Covid pandemic numerically smaller than it had been before Covid came and caused such disruption to our lives. This fruit of the pandemic left a question that rattled around the back of my mind, albeit quietly, that voiced itself in the following prayer:
“Lord, surely that was the opportunity that we needed to penetrate through the hardened hearts of the godless people of our day. If people are to come to our churches seeking for the salvation that is only found in Jesus Christ, surely that was the chance!”
A few years ago, the late George Verwer, the world-renowned founder of the world-wide mission society Operation Mobilisation, came to my sleepy little hometown of Wrexham, North Wales, to speak at a mission meeting. A large church building was hired out to host the meeting and all of the many churches throughout the locality were invited, across the many denominations. When the time for the first meeting to start came, the church was barely half-full. My church’s own evangelical reformed alliance community was the worst represented of all the denominations. I, like my pastor who had organised the event, was left feeling incredibly disheartened and downcast by the turnout:
“Lord, surely that greatly used, and still ever so passionate man of God was the opportunity we needed to breathe life into our flagging churches. If our churches are to be revived in our day, surely that was the chance!”
Perhaps some of you have experienced such feelings on similar widespread scales. Perhaps some of you have experienced similar feelings within a much more personal and intimate capacity.
Maybe you can imagine being a Christian who has a close and much-loved family member who is not a Christian and who’s opposition to Christianity is so strong they will not let you say a word about it to them. One day, a dear friend of theirs is killed in a sudden and unexpected way. In their struggle to come to terms with what has happened, this close family member begins to open up to you about their feelings relating to death, which then leads on to an hour-long conversation about God and the gospel of Jesus Christ. You are ever so thankful for this opportunity, but then a week passes by, and this family member has returned to their opposition to the Lord and refuses to hear of Him from you again:
“Lord, surely that was the opportunity I had been praying for them for so long. If they are to find salvation in Jesus Christ, surely that was the chance!”
Elijah
The great Old Testament prophet, Elijah, experienced these very same feelings in 1 Kings 18, 19.
In 1 Kings 18, Elijah has experienced that incredible victory over the prophets of Baal: 450 prophets of Baal verses Elijah, the one prophet of Yahweh. Both sides had built an altar to their god, and a bull was placed on top of each of the altars. The challenge was that both sides would call upon their god, praying for fire to be sent to consume their respective altars.
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In an age that denies truth and absolutes, Christians must resist the siren call to join with it in its deep-seated scepticism. There is real objective truth out there which is knowable. As Francis Schaeffer used to say, we may not have exhaustive truth, but we do have true truth. But more and more Christians today are caving in on this. 

When a culture becomes convinced that there is no longer any such thing as black and white, but just ninety-nine shades of grey, then the ones still holding to absolutes are considered to be troublemakers and madmen. Such is the case today for those who still affirm biblical Christianity.
The culture around us is steeped in relativism, subjectivism, and an aversion to truth. But sadly much of the church is moving in this direction as well. Those who have been involved in teaching young people over the years certainly will have noticed this shift in thinking, with more and more Christians expressing doubts about absolute truth.
I increasingly hear from some young people that they think we can’t be so black and white in our beliefs, and that the Bible itself is not so black and white. I always cringe when I hear such talk. Of course, to be fair, it does depend on just what they are referring to exactly.
If they simply mean that some things can be hard to understand, or that Christians can disagree on various issues – especially secondary matters – then yes, I can see where they are coming from. But if they mean that core Christian truths such as the Deity of Christ and the reliability of Scripture are just too fuzzy and unclear, then I have some real problems with this.
And many of them seem to think that the Bible is actually all very grey when it comes to key moral issues as well, such as abortion or homosexuality. When believers try to tell us that the Bible is not black and white on such issues, then you know that the world has been heavily influencing them.
The bottom line is this: Scripture IS black and white. How can it be otherwise? It is the very word of God, and God cannot lie. He is a God of truth, so all his words are true. As Jesus put it in John 17;17, “Your word is truth.” Or as Paul put it in Romans 3:4 “Even if everyone else is a liar, God is true” (NLT).
Sure, we recognise that while the Bible is completely true and without error, we are not. We are fallen and finite, so we need care and diligence as we seek to rightly understand and apply God’s truth. But we are not left in endless doubt and scepticism. The Holy Spirit has been given to every believer to guide them in all truth (John 16:13).
We can have real certainty – at least about the basics. As 1 John 5:13 says, “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know…” Indeed, the idea of certainty in belief is found throughout Scripture. I like what John Stott has to say about this. As he puts it in the beginning of his classic book Christ the Controversialist:
The corridors of the New Testament reverberate with dogmatic affirmations beginning ‘We know’, ‘We are sure’, ‘We are confident’. If you question this, read the First Epistle of John in which verbs meaning ‘to know’ occur about forty times. They strike a note of joyful assurance which is sadly missing from many parts of the church today and which needs to be recaptured.
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Excessive giving reveals the unsearchable depths of God’s love, the bottomless well of his heart. Nothing is wasted simply because it isn’t noticed by us. Every gift is of value because every gift is an expression of eternal love. For you. For me. The extravagance Dillard speaks of, the extravagance that surrounds us, is the unceasing, unparalleled expression of God’s love. God is spendthrift because his love is eternal.

As I spoke recently with The Laymen’s Lounge about The Book of Giving, one point that kept coming up in our conversation was God’s prodigality (his being excessively lavish) in the good things he gives us. And what blows my mind is that the vast majority of God’s gifts go unnoticed. It’s one thing to be prodigal; it’s another to be prodigal anonymously; and it’s still another to be prodigal anonymously towards people who will miss most of your gifts. That seems like such a waste to us, doesn’t it? But there’s something deeper being revealed here.
Yesterday, the sunset that burned the underbellies of our gray-purple clouds with pink and gold, igniting them like clothes cast off from the ancient bodies of giants, drifting toward the orange horizon—how many people in our town never picked their head up to look at it? Some thousands. And yet the gift was still given. Or those two red-tailed hawks that circled just above our house, dancing with each other as if connected by a long, invisible rope—why was I the only one to see it? Or that fleeting sense of warm sunshine on my skin as I started my car—I barely paused to notice it. Why such excess, which appears to be wasted? Annie Dillard once wrote, “Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there” (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p. 10). But most of the time we aren’t there, or can’t be. Why does God still run the world this way?
I had to laugh when I read Dillard’s description of nature and the insects she finds in the wild.
Nature is, above all, profligate. Don’t believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil. Wouldn’t it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place? This deciduous business alone is a radical scheme, the brainchild of a deranged manic-depressive with limitless capital. Extravagance! Nature will try anything once. This is what the sign of the insects says. No form is too gruesome, no behavior too grotesque. If you’re dealing with organic compounds, then let them combine. If it works, if it quickens, set it clacking in the grass; there’s always room for one more; you ain’t so handsome yourself. This is a spendthrift economy; though nothing is lost, all is spent.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p. 66
Why the extravagance? Why does God give us billions of gifts every second (even the chance to marvel at a myriad of strange insects) when most of us won’t end up seeing the majority of them? Why is God so spendthrift?
Prodigality and the Heart of God
We have to start answering all of our questions about God with the Creator-creature distinction. Our understanding of gifts isn’t his understanding. 
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